A battleground with no neutral ground: Twitter for scientists

The overlapping of the sciences is made the subject of much rhetorical writing now-a-days, and its appreciation is one of the most prominent signs of the modern development of the doctrine of Continuity which has been so fruitful in the Philosophy of Discovery. The boundary-line which once separated the geologist and ethnologist has in consequence of this development entirely disappeared, and every one now admits as a postulate that between the two sciences there is a stretch of neutral ground belonging to neither exclusively, and where the students of each must of necessity reap if their harvest is to be complete. Not only so, but it is beginning to be seen that the methods and the directions of the arguments in each science being more or less different—the one partaking much more of the historical, and the other of the experimental method—that it is well that where they overlap the results of each should be closely compared, and thus not only secure a double modicum of certitude, but also suggest fresh veins of untried material where we may put in our mattock with renewed hope of solving some apparently hopeless problems.

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RISE, GRUBENHUND: ON PROVINCIALIZING KUHN

Modern Intellectual History ◽

10.1017/s1479244311000503 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 109-126 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

DEBORAH R. COEN

Keyword(s):

History Of Science ◽

Knowledge Production ◽

Foreign Languages ◽

Ludwik Fleck ◽

Scientific Revolutions ◽

Visual Metaphors ◽

Structure Of Scientific Revolutions ◽

History Of ◽

Kuhnian Revolution ◽

Neutral Ground

Bilingualism was Kuhn's solution to the problem of relativism, the problem raised by his own theory of incommensurability. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that scientific theories are separated by gulfs of mutual incomprehension. There is no neutral ground from which to judge one theory fitter than another. Each is formulated in its own language and cannot be translated into the idiom of another. Yet, like many Americans, Kuhn never had the experience of moving comfortably between languages. “I've never been any good really at foreign languages,” he admitted in an interview soon before his death. “I can read French, I can read German, if I'm dropped into one of those countries I can stammer along for a while, but my command of foreign languages is not good, and never has been, which makes it somewhat ironic that much of my thought these days goes to language.” Kuhn may have been confessing to more than a personal weakness. His linguistic ineptitude seems to be a clue to his overweening emphasis on the difficulty of “transworld travel.” Multilingualism remained for him an abstraction. In this respect, I will argue, Kuhn engendered a peculiarly American turn in the history of science. Kuhn's argument for the dependence of science on the norms of particular communities has been central to the development of studies of science in and as culture since the 1980s. Recent work on the mutual construction of science and nationalism, for instance, is undeniably in Kuhn's debt. Nonetheless, the Kuhnian revolution cut off other avenues of research. In this essay, I draw on the counterexample of the physician–historian Ludwik Fleck, as well as on critiques by Steve Fuller and Ted Porter, to suggest one way to situate Kuhn within the broader history of the history of science. To echo Kuhn's own visual metaphors, one of the profound effects of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the field of history of science was to render certain modes of knowledge production virtually invisible.

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A HYBRID TRANSLATION THEORY FOR EU TEXTS

Vertimo studijos ◽

10.15388/vertstud.2012.5.10561 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 5 (5) ◽

pp. 76 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Vilelmini Sosoni

Keyword(s):

Linguistic Diversity ◽

Prima Facie ◽

Translation Theory ◽

Discourse Community ◽

Source Text ◽

Cultural And Linguistic Diversity ◽

Translation Practice ◽

Textual Features ◽

To Come ◽

Neutral Ground

EU texts are produced by way of multilingual negotiation in a supranational multicultural discourse community, where there is no linguistically neutral ground and where the internationalisation of concepts and ideas is a sine qua non. As a result, they are idiosyncratic texts, reflecting specific textual features. Their translation in the current 23 official EU languages is equally idiosyncratic and challenging, to say the least, especially since it is shaped under the EU’s overwhelming cultural and linguistic diversity, the constraints of its policy of multilingualism, and the subsequent policy of linguistic equality which states that all languages are equal, or ‘equally authentic’ (Wagner, Bech, Martinez 2002, 7), and that translations are not really translations but language versions. In other words, in the framework of EU translation, the terms source text (ST) and target text (TT) cease to exist, while the prima facie illusory notion of ‘equivalence’ seems to resurface—though altered in nature—and dominate the translation practice. It thus goes without saying that in the case of EU texts and their translation a tailor-made theoretical framework is required where many classic concepts of Translation Studies (TS), such as ST, TT and equivalence need to be re-evaluated and redefined, and at the same time functionalist approaches and the postmodernist concepts of intertextuality, hybridity and in-betweenness need to come to the fore. The proposed translation theory for EU texts flaunts the feature inherent in their production, it is—just like them—hybrid.

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